Yesterday, we told you all about our new Ergodyne tool lanyards; today, we'd like to show you a video that Ergodyne made to promote their products and encourage people to stay safe whilst working at height:
The video above is all about what Ergodyne call 'The Three Ts': Tethering, Topping, and Tagging. Don't worry if you haven't the time to watch the whole thing - here are The Three Ts in a nutshell:
The following considerations are absolutely critical for anyone who works at height:
As these unfortunate watermelons found out, even small items (such as nuts and bolts) can do a lot of damage when dropped from height!
Click here for more information about working at height, or visit SafetyLiftinGear's Height Safety section to find out how we can help you to stay safe at work.
Height safety is serious business. According to the Health and Safety Executive, falls from height were responsible for more than 20% of fatal workplace injuries in the UK in 2013/14, as well as for over 15% of all major or specified injuries during that same period.
In spite of these statistics - the numerous deaths, the thousands upon thousands of injuries - far too many British businesses are still neglecting their responsibilities when it comes to working at height. Here are three sobering case studies from this month alone - all were reported on the HSE website within two weeks of time of writing:
Photograph from press.hse.gov.uk
Philip Evans (originally from Penarth, South Wales) died in hospital after a 4.5 metre fall, which he suffered whilst working on a store front in Exeter. Mr Evans had been making his way along a glass canopy when he fell through an unguarded gap, which had apparently been created during previous work when a pane of glass had been removed from the canopy and no replacement put in. His employer, London Fenestration Traded Ltd, has now been fined £200,000 with £17,790 costs, as has Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd, the principal contractor for the job in question.
Turbo Property and Cleaning Services Ltd - a Sheffield-based company - were found guilty of breaching both the Work at Height Regulations 2005 and the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 this week. Late last year, one of Turbo's employees was found working on "a fragile roof with no protection measures in place"; the company has been fined £2,000 for this violation.
When Andrew Bannister was told to repair a fragile roof on a farm in Leicestershire, he expressed some concern, but his employer sent him up without any fall protection equipment anyway. What happened next? A 10-metre fall, a painful landing on a concrete floor, and several serious injuries. Mr Bannister (48 years old at the time of the incident in question) was left with a broken neck, a broken back, and three broken ribs after falling through the roof of the barn; he is now permanently reliant upon a walking stick, and has stated, "I will be on pain killers for the rest of my life. The injury has changed my life completely." PK & IF Cobley Ltd were recently fined £75,000 (plus £29,351.88 costs) for failing to prevent the fall.
If these stories of death, injury, and punishment have made you realise that you could be doing more to protect your workers, head over to SafetyLiftinGear's Height Safety Equipment department - we supply a huge variety of safety harnesses, fall prevention systems, edge protection products, and everything else you need to prevent falls from height.
If you and/or your employees work at height, it is crucial to ensure that all work is carried out as safely as possible. Today, we're going to answer some frequently asked questions on the subject of working at height - if you're not sure what's required of you, read on to find out more about height safety and what you should be doing about it:
The HSE website defines 'work at height' as any work carried out in "any place where, if there were no precautions in place, a person could fall a distance liable to cause personal injury". You don't have to be a specific distance above the ground before you qualify - if there's a chance you could fall and hurt yourself, you're working at height.
Again, there's no objective answer to this question: if you suffer a fall, the severity of your injuries will depend on your age, your weight, the surface on which you land, the way in which you land, and dozens of other factors besides the exact height you fell from. People have been known to survive falls from several kilometres high; conversely, people have been seriously injured and even killed by falls of a few feet or even less. This is why there is no specified limit to what constitutes 'working at height' - even the smallest of falls can be catastrophic!
We answered this question last month - the Work at Height Regulations 2005 don't specify any particular equipment or required safety measures, but they do state the need for "sufficient work equipment" and a proper assessment of any height safety risks. It's basically up to you to decide what precautions and which pieces of equipment will best protect you and your workers, but you won't get away with not doing anything.
Your main aim when selecting height safety equipment should be to prevent a fall from occurring. This can be achieved with safety harnesses and fall arrest blocks. Some kind of edge protection system can also help to minimise the risk of an accident. Otherwise, height safety generally depends on common sense - see our height safety fails blog for some examples of what not to do.
Need some height safety equipment? Visit our Working at Height department.
Load restraint isn't a particularly complicated science: all you have to do is make sure that your goods don't fall off the vehicle that's transporting them from A to B. Not exactly brain surgery, is it?
And yet we still see far too many instances of half-hearted load restraint, which all too often results in a scene like this:
Improper load restraint can be very costly if your goods get damaged, but more importantly, an accident like the one pictured above can be life-threatening. What if your unsecured load crashes into another vehicle, or hits a passing pedestrian?
The need for adequate load restraint is very pressing indeed, though if you're reading this, you've probably recognised that already. Here, then, are a few tips that will help you to keep everything secure and protect the people around you:
In a nutshell, our advice is this: assess your loads properly, choose an appropriate load restraint method (or methods) for the job, and ensure that everything has been properly secured before beginning your journey.
SafetyLiftinGear's full collection of load restraint equipment can be found here - feel free to email sales@safetyliftingear.com if you have any further questions.
We're currently slap-bang in the middle of UK Health & Safety Week, an annual observance that aims to celebrate and promote health and safety while highlighting improvements that could still be made. The main event is the Safety & Health Expo, which is currently taking place in London, but people all over the British Isles have been getting involved, posting 'helfies' and sharing their stories of health and safety in action.
Of course, health and safety regulations are essential to the safety of practically everyone in the country, and yet the H&S industry tends to get rather a bad rap from the British press. For example, how often do you see headlines like these?
Yes, in spite of all the lives it saves, it seems that health and safety will forever be blamed for all sorts of silly little things. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) even has an entire blog dedicated to refuting such silly safety myths as "shop assistants can't use scissors" and "balloons are unsuitable for children's parties".
This being Health & Safety Week, we at SLG just wanted to take a moment to remind everyone that health and safety isn't here to ruin your fun - it's here to save your life. Real health and safety (as opposed to the phoney kind that's almost always at the heart of silly stories like those mentioned above) is about wearing safety harnesses to prevent deadly falls and following the correct procedure when lifting dangerously heavy objects.
So next time you think of speaking ill of health and safety, just think about where we'd all be without it!
Health and safety play a vital role in every workplace, regardless of industry or job role. Whether you work in hospitality, healthcare or construction, health and safety is crucial for keeping both workers and the public safe, reducing expenses, ensuring legal compliance and a plethora of other reasons we will touch on in this article!
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